This sexual inquisition is no kind of justice

The tsunami of allegations about the sexual misbehaviour of men prominent in public life shows no sign of abating. Almost every day sees another high-profile man accused of sexual assault or harassment, leaving him fighting for his reputation and career. …

Guilt is being assumed merely on the word of the accusers; and serious charges are being lumped together with minor lapses such as lewd or suggestive remarks or the kind of male flirtatiousness that was once regarded as acceptable.

The purpose of this over-reaction is to damn all chaps as congenital cavemen and portray women as victims of male patriarchy. It has little to do with justice, looking instead suspiciously like a campaign of collective vengeance against the male sex. …

Finally, someone speaking the underlying truths:

Although individual women were sometimes outright victims, what so many refuse to acknowledge is that this serial male misbehaviour is at least partly the result of the sexual revolution that was driven by women.

Contrary to the notion of patriarchy, western women make and control the rules of the sexual game. For centuries, they thought their interests lay in getting their children’s father to support the family.

So the bargain was struck between the sexes. Women would be sexually available only to the man who would father their children, thus providing the all-important guarantee that the children were indeed his and which was the greatest inducement to stick around. Obviously those rules were frequently broken. The key point, though, was that everyone knew that those were the rules.

In the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, however, women tore them up and declared the bargain to be an oppressive relic of the past. Henceforth, men could be discarded as useless or worse, other than for their unavoidable biological contribution to the production of a child, and women would behave with sexual freedom.

With the bargain no longer operative, many men assumed there were no longer constraints on their behaviour either. This doesn’t in any way excuse the assaults, but the outrage over the widespread male assumption that so many women are “up for it” surely amounts to hypocrisy on a massive scale.

The line between justice and vengeance may be narrow but it is clear. The self-deceptive sexual inquisition now under way has crossed that line.